A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

so far as it can be thus decided. From 1848 till our own day it has been predominantly naturalistic and non-religious. After Guizot and the Thierrys, the nearest approach to Christianity by an influential French historian is perhaps in the case of the very heterodox Edgar Quinet. Michelet was a mere heretic in the eyes of the faithful, Saisset describing his book Du Prêtre, de la Femme, et de la Famille (1845), as a "renaissance of Voltaireanism." [1834] His whole brilliant History, indeed, is from beginning to end rationalistic, challenging as it does all the decorous traditions, exposing the failure of the faith to civilize, pronouncing that "the monastic Middle Age is an age of idiots" and the scholastic world which followed it an age of artificially formed fools, [1835] flouting dogma and discrediting creed over each of their miscarriages. [1836] And he was popular, withal, not only because of his vividness and unfailing freshness, but because his convictions were those of the best intelligence around him. In poetry and fiction the predominance of one or other shade of freethinking is signal. Balzac, who grew up in the age of reaction, makes essentially for rationalism by his intense analysis; and after him the difficulty is to find a great French novelist who is not frankly rationalistic. George Sand will probably not be claimed by orthodoxy; and Beyle, Constant, Flaubert, Mérimée, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, and the De Goncourts make a list against which can be set only the names of M. Bourget, an artist of the second order, and of the distinguished décadent Huysmans, who became a Trappist after a life marked by a philosophy and practice of an extremely different complexion.